In Chapter 14, the authors tell the stories of nations and regions that were able to break out of their vicious cycles of extractive institutions and used some critical junctures to their advantage. Botswana has an interesting and important story, since it not only gained its own political independence but the independence was orderly and led to the formation of the Botswana Democratic Party. It kept the discovery of new minerals from leading to extraction by distributing subsoil mineral rights through Seretse Khama's government, which was considerably less bad than it might have been. It grew because it seized the critical juncture of post-colonial independence and created inclusive institutions.

Starting in the 1950s, Southern institutions in the U.S. began to move decisively away from extractive institutions that had characterized...